More than 100 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” That motto seems to be the philosophy behind the Trump administration’s recently released Great Healthcare Plan.
And based on the way Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, described the plan’s goals to Fox News on Wednesday, it sounds pretty dang dystopian.
Most people might assume a good health care plan should hope to help citizens stay healthy so they can pursue, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But the former TV doctor, widely known as Dr. Oz, suggested to Maria Bartiromo that the president’s plan is designed so American businesses can basically suck every last bit of effort out of workers before they punch that final time card.
“If we can get the average person … to work one more year in their whole lifetime — just stay in your workplace for one more year — that is worth about $3 trillion to the U.S. GDP. That’s the productivity we would unleash. … If you’re sick, you can’t work,” Oz explained.
Considering Trump’s health care plan is already being criticized for lacking specifics, many people on social media didn’t agree with Oz’s suggestion that health care should focus solely on keeping people healthy so they can keep working for their corporate overlords.
Oz has a long history of saying things that seem divorced from facts or reason, or just out of touch ― such as the many quack treatments he was criticized for promoting during his time as a TV personality.
Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Oz had claimed Trump has “the highest testosterone level” of anyone over 70 years old that he has ever seen.
He unhelpfully suggested in November that the solution to reducing health care spending in America is to “get healthier.” And he told Americans nervous about losing their Medicare benefits last July to adjust to any changes by eating less cake.
In April 2020, Oz sparked widespread controversy toward the start of the COVID-19 pandemic by lobbying for schools to reopen, arguing that doing so would “only cost us 2-3%, in terms of total mortality.”
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